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Business Coaching: Empowering Your Clients

October 4, 2010 — Anonymous

Bryan's mission is to help business owners and CEOs of small to medium size organizations develop to their full potential. His goal is to achieve success for your organization as you define it. He is confident that together you will see dramatic improvement in the many facets of your organization.

Empowering others is the single most important key to being a successful business coach.

If you can empower your clients then you can inspire them and motivate them to do great things. If you have given your clients the power to do great things, then you’ve done your job as a business coach.

One of the best ‘take aways’ I get from Brian Tracy when he talks about empowerment is this:

“Empower means ‘putting power into,’ and it can also mean ‘bringing energy and enthusiasm out of.’ So the first step in empowering people is to refrain from doing anything that dis-empowers them or reduces their energy and enthusiasm for what they are doing.”

-Brian Tracy

If you can’t come in to a coaching situation with loads of energy, a positive attitude and zero judgement – you can’t be in the coaching business.

LISTEN. First off, you need to be supportive, empathetic and appreciative: Make the best effort to understand what the client is facing: listen carefully and pay attention to what is being said.

SHARE. Most FocalPoint Business Coaches have been there and done that – take your experience and share it with your client. That’s part of the empathy – but it’s also part of building a relationship and trust – if you are willing to expose a tiny bit of your underbelly, find some common ground, your client is going to feel like they’re working with someone who appreciates where they’re coming from.

LIST. When your client starts to tell you about their business – get them to list everything that has been done and take some notes, make a list of positives so that you can feed it back to them and they can see all that they have accomplished so far. They need to know they have gone forward. Also, by getting them to make that list of everything, they can start to see clearly where work needs to be done.

SET GOALS. Once the work that needs to be done is defined then goals can be set. By setting goals with clearly defined objectives a client can focus on tasks towards achieving their goals.

RECOGNITION. Completion of each task needs to be recognized by the client and by you as their business coach – an “’atta boy” pat on the back combined with concrete results in the form of numbers to a show a task has been completed will make a client feel like they are in control – that they can take on even more. They will feel empowered.

These are some very basic processes for coaching empowerment – I would love to hear what others might include in the mix. Any additions?

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